The Rhesus Chart by Charles Stross Read Free Book Online Page A

melanoma; every winter cold is multidrug-resistant tuberculosis.
    Right now he’s a bundle of pure anxiety because of his salary. He’s theoretically due for a bonus—determined by the overall financial performance of the entire Scrum at the end of the financial year—but his basic salary of a little over £60,000 seems as dwindlingly inadequate as a Jobseeker’s Allowance when stacked up against the Croesian excesses on display in the basement car park. And he gets to see the basement car park every morning when he chains up his bicycle after cycling in from his room in a house in Poplar. He’s only been in the City for ten months (although it sometimes feels like a life sentence superimposed on a millisecond), and the habits of impoverished frugality he learned as a student weigh him down even as he tries to put on a good face for the people he works with.
    You wouldn’t want to be Alex. Being Alex, aged twenty-four and alone in the City, is awful. But being Alex in three hours’ time is going to be much, much worse—and he’ll still be alive to feel it.
     • • • 
    ONE OF THE GREAT BESETTING PROBLEMS OF THE MODERN AGE is what to do with too much information. This is especially true of high-frequency share trading, where every second a Sahara-sized sand dune of data must be gulped down and sifted for the fragrant cat-turds of relevant market movements. The ebb and flow of share prices is familiar from a thousand ticker-tape parades and ever-shifting number grids, but that barely scratches the surface of the problem. Your stake in a corporation that makes robot milking machines for the dairy industry can be affected by a press release from an upstream supplier announcing a better image recognition algorithm for udders. Or by a newspaper article in which a farmer explains that, because the release cycle for new cows (nine months and one week) is shorter than the release cycle for new udder-recognition software (eighteen months), they’ve been breeding cows for teats that are compatible with robot vision systems. Or by a supermarket capping the price of dairy produce, leading to a liquidity crisis in Ambridge.
    The Bank had been addressing the problem of drinking from the data firehose for many years, of course. Indeed, one of the Scrum’s major tasks was to develop the banking equivalent of a self-cleaning litter tray: tools to help traders visually explore dizzying multidimensional arrays of ever-changing data without oversimplifying it into uselessness or causing them to throw up last night’s Premier Cru.
    Alex was working late on a surge effort, trying to hook a new data set up to a funky fractal visualizer Dick and Evan had knocked up two months earlier: a Spanner-based widget that turned sixty-four dimensional data sets into rolling three-dimensional landscapes, the gradient and color and friction and transparency of each crusty outcropping encoding some aspect of the object of fascination. The goal: pour in the popularity of babies’ names over the past decade, sales of movie tickets in matinee showings, the Top 40 tracks pirated on BitTorrent, and the phase of the moon: get out an ordered list of toy manufacturers to buy or sell on the basis of their spin-off movie merchandising prospects. The reality so far: get out a scary-looking ski slope with black flags on the off-piste runs, not entirely suitable for traversal by a trading desk strapped to a snowboard.
    Not that Alex knew much about skiing—his early lessons at school had been terminated by an unpleasant fall that had convinced him he’d broken his fibula for three days—but after eight nearly uninterrupted hours of staring at the screen he’d begun to go scooshy-eyed, his bladder was filing for divorce, and the interlocking mass of Möbius gears squirming behind his eyelids still resolutely refused to come into sharp focus.
    I should go home,
he realized.
I’m not getting anywhere. Maybe if I sleep on it, it’ll come to me in the